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Public vs. Charter Schools: A New Debate

Downtown, talk of placing a new charter school inside a popular Lower East Side public school has so angered the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, that he is threatening to look into the legality of the city's placement of charter schools -- privately run, but with some public money -- in public school buildings.

"There is no reason that the mayor or the chancellor should be giving away these facilities to a nonpublic endeavor," Mr. Silver said yesterday.

Uptown, a charged dispute over charters is also raging, with Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers union, fighting a plan to have a Harlem elementary school share space with a charter being created by Eva S. Moskowitz, who as chairwoman of the City Council's education committee sharply criticized the union's contract.

"It would hurt a school that has turned around," Ms. Weingarten said.

The two high-profile battles show how difficult it is to find space for charter schools in a city with expensive real estate. They also illustrate the pitfalls of remaking a school system with 1.1 million schoolchildren, 80,000 teachers, and no shortage of parents and politicians with a stake in the matter, and different views about education policy.

The battles over the schools on the Lower East Side and in Harlem have put city education officials in the middle, scrambling to mediate between the combatants uptown and to mollify parents and educators in the Mr. Silver's district.

Mr. Silver, a Democrat, spoke yesterday a week after the State Legislature approved a budget giving the city billions more in construction aid. But before the budget was approved, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had threatened to cut certain school construction projects in Mr. Silver's district, and a war of words ensued.

Now Albany is likely to turn its attention to Mr. Bloomberg's request to lift the cap on 100 charter schools statewide, a measure that Mr. Silver indicated yesterday could be in jeopardy.

"I am reluctant, but I will listen," Mr. Silver said of lifting the cap.

But he expressed reservations about charter schools, saying that they have the effect of cherry-picking students with the most involved parents because as a practical matter, only parents who understand that admission is by lottery, will enter for their children.

Mr. Silver also attacked a premise at the heart of the charter school movement -- that they help improve public schools through healthy competition. He suggested instead that the reliance on charter schools is an indication that Mr. Bloomberg was having trouble turning around the city schools.

"I'm interpreting his message now as 'I failed, and I need some other entity to be able to educate children in order to get me to make the public schools more competitive,' " Mr. Silver said. "There's no other conclusion that you can reach."

Explaining why he opposed putting the new charter school, Ross Global Academy, inside the school in his district, Mr. Silver added, "We're in the process of providing record amounts of money to build new public schools, and when we have a public school that is available to accommodate public school students, the chancellor shouldn't be giving it away."

Garth Harries, chief executive of the city Department of Education's Office of New Schools, said the plan to put the Ross school inside the New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math school, or NEST+m, as the public school is known, was still "under consideration." The Ross school is modeled after a private school in East Hampton that was founded by Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of the Time Warner chairman Steven J. Ross.

"This building has consistently shown as having less enrollment than the building was designed for," Mr. Harries said. "That's a question that as a department we've gone back and forth with the NEST+m community about, without resolving."

There are already 27 charter schools inside traditional public school buildings, Mr. Harries said, and 10 more such placements are planned in the next school year.

"Ultimately it's the department's responsibility to make sure all of our buildings are used for the benefit of as many kids as is appropriate," Mr. Harries said. "I think of it like so many other school system resources. There's dollars, there's classrooms, there's students, there's teachers, there's all the rest. And part of the responsibility we have is to try to assure a distribution of those resources to the maximum benefit of the maximum number of kids."

Parents and the principal of the NEST+m school, which has about 730 students this year and is expecting 1,100 next year, say that until this week city education officials had not notified them about the plan to bring in the charter. Yesterday, the school, and its PTA issued statements criticizing the proposal.

In Harlem, meanwhile, the teachers' union and parents are protesting a plan to put Ms. Moskowitz's new charter school, Harlem Success, inside Public School 154, which years ago was transformed from failing to successful.

In a telephone interview from Houston, where she was visiting a charter school, Ms. Moskowitz, who left the City Council to put her educational theories into practice, attributed the opposition to her school to her history of animosity with Ms. Weingarten. The two sparred frequently over the teachers' contract. And Ms. Moskowitz announced her plans to become executive director of Harlem Success only after being defeated in a Democratic primary for Manhattan borough president, an outcome affected by the union's support for Scott Stringer, the victor.

"It would really sadden me and frankly tick me off if Randi is going to make somehow Harlem students victims in her personal vendetta against me," Ms. Moskowitz said. "She has repeatedly said that I'm going to pay. I was hoping that my political career would suffice, but perhaps not."

Ms. Moskowitz added: "Not only are schools going into schools already all over the city, but even within Harlem there are charter schools going into other schools. And Randi is making an issue of this particular situation."

In recent weeks, that battle has heated up. Last week, more than 100 P.S. 154 parents showed up for a heated P.T.A. meeting to discuss the charter school. Next week, Ms. Weingarten is expected to join teachers in a protest outside the school.

Ms. Weingarten said Ms. Moskowtiz's involvement with the charter had nothing to do with her opposing it.

"It would be a real mistake to frame this as Eva versus Randi, because this community is really upset," she said.

Dawn DeCosta, the teachers' union chapter leader at P.S. 154, said she first learned that Harlem Success was coming into the school in late February, when a parent wandered into the school with a Harlem Success brochure listing P.S. 154's address. She said she was particularly troubled to hear recently that Harlem Success would take up an entire floor in her school, a plan she said would force P.S. 154 to do away with its small classes and other signature programs.

"We are not against charter schools," she said. "We just don't believe it should be here."